Buying an NAS. Help/advice

[BicycleRepairMan]

Hi. I am looking to upgrade the available space on my computer. I have been looking into NAS, but the only devices I see that would fit what I think my needs are are few, expensive and have vague reviews.

I have about 1TB of disk space right now (almost full). I want to have a backup of that, and a friend of mine suggested I look at NASs. Additionally, I estimate that I have 1TB +/- a few hundred gigs of data on dvds and cds that I want to put onto a hard drive (and back THAT up). So now that's 4TB all told. Then I figured I'd get 1TB for future space considerations. Backing that disc up would bring it all to 6TB.

I have a few questions: Do I need to get one NAS device that can take 6TBs? And if so are there diskless drives where I can put drives of my choice into that NAS.
Can I get, say, 3 2TB NAS devices and link them together? I was told to look at Netgear for the NAS and seagate for the drives. I have a Windows system and would not be installing this by myself. I have a computer tech who would do it for me.

Any other tips are appreciated. Thanks!

 

[BicycleRepairMan]

anyone?

 

[pepperman]

How much are you looking to spend on this project?
The reason I ask is NAS enclosures (not to mention 6 TB of drive space) is rather expensive; You might want to consider a few external HDDs and one NAS for shared backup.

As for 3 (or more) NAS enclosures, they would have to be addressed as separate devices, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem; just make sure you have enough ports on your switch.

 

[sub mesa]

Why not build your NAS and run FreeNAS on it or something?
I can't help you with the ready-made NAS solutions, except that they won't allow you to use ZFS on them.